As if ENRON and The
Allied Irish Bank weren't enough, Madoff, we learn, made off with enough
money to feed a small developing nation for several years. It was money
that could have given hundreds of thousands a decent education. Madoff
could have built hospitals too, and thrown a year or two's salary for
thousands of doctors and nurses into the bargain. He didn't. Why not?
It might have made him feel better and he wouldn't have had to say sorry...

No, the whole
point was to make money because that's how the system was supposed to
work. Freedom of enterprise was the freedom trumping all others, greed
was considered good and riches were bound to trickle down even if all
evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Meanwhile the Holy Market
Forces were proclaimed self-regulatory. You can't buck the market,
we were told. Not even Adam Smith believed that.

We were all
expected to embrace these articles of faith. Inquisitors of managerial
mumbo-jumbo stalked hospital and university corridors forcing public servants
to take part in sadistic games of quality
assurance competition and league tables. Altruism and public service
were seen as enemies of the state because they directly threatened the
money magic of the Market.

It was those
who told us we couldn't buck the market that bucked it good and proper
this time, dragging us all into the mayhem they themselves made. Now they
expect us, with the tax money we pay and they avoid, to clean up the mess
they've made.

With the
collapse of the US-led financial system it has become obvious that making
money is about as constructive as practising alchemy. Exponents of both
modes of magic believe that something can be made from nothing. Both practices
are a waste of time and effort.

Money is
first and foremost an abstraction. Even though you may have a banknote
or two in your pocket, money has no real value in itself. Unless your
banknotes can be used like vouchers to exchange for something else, they're
literally not worth the paper they're printed on there's not much
room left to write or draw on them and they're too hard and unabsorbant
to wipe your nose or bottom with.

The only
practical purpose of money is to avoid the encumbrance and confusion of
bartering. For example, this house is worth how many sheep? This sheep
is worth how much of this type of cloth? How much advice of this sort
do I need to give you before you give me a pitcher of clean water?

The goods
and services just mentioned have value to the seller in relation to what
he or she can get in exchange, while their value to the buyer is more
in terms of their usefulness. This distinction is similar to the difference
between Marx's notions of exchange value and use value. The social and
mental problem with money is that while, like the banknotes in your pocket,
they have a physical existence, they have virtually no use value in themselves:
they only represent potential exchange value. This paradox is even more
obvious with online transactions where figures representing money, the
abstraction of exchange value, flash by on finance corporation monitors.

You start
to wonder (at least I do) where the use value is and what, if any, is
the relation between money as exchange value and the use value of services
and commodities to which that exchange value (as money) is supposed to
be equivalent. This dissociation, it seems to me, is one of capitalism's
most stupid absurdities. The acquisition and accumulation of capital (money)
becomes an end in itself without consideration of value in any other terms
than those of exchange. Use value, in the sense of social, cultural and
environmental benefit or improvement is, under capitalism, always subservient
to motives of profit. That is of course both ridiculous and destructive.

Those who
propagate for the financial system now in utter disgrace want us to believe
that humans are intrinsically individualistic and greedy, that we are
all hoarders, that we all love to own stuff and that we hate sharing it
with others. Well, if that were so, why are people who give a lot, people
who are considered generous, much happier than those who don't and aren't?
And how can humans be natural hoarders when we've been nomadic for the
vast majority of our time as a species here on this earth? I mean, hoarding
and owning loads of stuff is just silly if you're a nomad because you
have to make a lot of long journeys on foot. The human species developed
for hundreds of thousands of years (homo erectus etc.) before becoming
homo sapiens sapiens (c. 200,000 B.P.) in the African savana. After that
we lived exclusively as nomads until around 10,000, since when (<5%
of those 220,000 years) we've gradually come to live mainly in rural or
urban settlements. That's far too little evolutionary time for anything
to become hardwired as part of human nature. In other words, those who
say were all intrinsically greedy hoarders are either totally ignorant
or else theyre lying. Why
would they want to lie?

You dont have to be a professor of social psychology to work out
why rich and privileged people want the rest of us to believe were
all greedy and always will be. So,
if someone starts telling you that hoarding and owning stuff is biologically
hardwired in humans, or that we are all in any other way intrinsically
greedy as a species, you'll know they're talking bullshit. Like a lot
of bullshit, it's bullshit with an agenda. Were all supposed to
be just as bad as those who make obscene amounts of money at the detriment
of others in the long or short term. Were all supposed to want to
behave like them and to believe thats how we all are by nature.
Were supposed to be smart (=devious), to have as little
respect for others and for the planet as they do, and to want to uselessly
amass wealth. They tell us thats reality! Well, they certainly got
it abominably wrong [again] this time.

Humans
would have not have lasted this long as a species without communal collaboration
and cooperation. It is only since capitalism became the uncontested dominant
mode of structuring human societies that we have had real problems with
our natural environment and guess which sort of people were the last to
admit we needed collective efforts to save the planet.

Personally,
I'd like to know why Obamas surrounded himself with economic advisors
who were part of the mad financial system all of us are suffering from.
I've heard of setting thieves to catch thieves and of hackers to
catch hackers but stars of finance manipulation have done sweet
nothing to inspire any confidence or respect in me.

In
economics, the majority are always wrong. [Less protectively, contemporary
"economists" lie because the whole, purposed lie of usury and unearned taking
is unsustainable in any practical implementation, and because therefore,
no intelligent public would ever assent to the dispossession and usurpation
which the lies are designed to impose upon them. Thus...] The study of "money,"
above all other fields, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth
or to evade truth, not to reveal it.
(John
Kenneth Galbraith)


Smith favored government regulation whenever the "invisible hand" of free enterprise
abused the rights of individuals and small business to enjoy the benefits of
liberty, which sadly is the case today writes Judah
Freed in examiner.com [2009-01-26]. He continues: From what I can
tell, the people being nominated by Obama to the top financial governance positions
mistakenly believe in the false god of unregulated free markets that Adam Smith
never condoned. Obama promised a change, but these nominees look like more of
the same.´ Yes. We have to monitor all of this very carefully. Personally,
I dont see how a system based on speculating about the probability of
numerical abstractions about the risks of abstractions of abstractions of probability
about abstractions of real use values can ever be viable, let alone how any
public body can be expected to follow and check the validity (what validity
in such a world of derivative magic?) of every major transfer of monetary value
inside that crazy system.